THINKing

The Rule Of Reciprocity

Are you using the rule of reciprocity?  I ran across this topic not too long ago, and it got me to thinking about how this rule applies to marketing and PR.

Much of what we PR people do is based upon this rule. Do something for someone else and they will turn around and do something of equal or greater value for you.

I’ve written about this before in a series of posts about networking and gaining new business.

Friend Brent Dees owns Focus Four, a three-year curriculum to teach business owners how to work on their business and not in their business. In the Focus Four class, Brent teaches you how to utilize this rule most effectively. Says Brent,

“You should identify the people who can do the most to assist you in reaching your personal and business goals and then find out what they are trying to achieve. Once you know this, your efforts should be directed toward helping them reach their goals. This is smart business and good public relations.”

Remember, you do it because you want to help them. Expect nothing in return from them. But guess what? They always return the favor a hundredfold. That’s how to put reciprocity on steroids.

How are you using this rule in your business or your life?

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How To Be A Great Radio Guest

Radio - despite changes in media habits - still is a great way to get in front of a lot of people. As a radio talk show guest on a national program, millions could hear your message. Talk radio listeners tune in about 20 percent more than the average radio listener.

Being a great guest takes some work on your part. Let’s review what you must do in order to attain great guest status.

Be Available. Journalists of all stripes complain about not being able to reach sources when they need them. With radio, it is not just a 9 - 5 job. The great radio guest will show up whenever he or she is needed.

Be Conversational. This goes beyond your ability to carry on a good conversation. You must speak clearly, concisely and in terms the average listener understands. Start throwing around business-speak like “that’s not in my wheelhouse” and get booted off the show before it starts. In fact, don’t talk like that when you are not on radio!

Be Ubiquitous. It was true when I was in radio and it is still true today, radio people follow their print brethren. If you have been quoted by a news magazine or newspaper, radio producers are more likely to have you on. And, help producers locate you. Make sure you have an online presence and that you have your media clips accessible so producers can determine if you are the right source for them.

Be In The Moment. If you are out pitching yourself, take advantage of the news cycle. If there is nothing happening currently that ties your expertise into the topic of the day, then wait. Your day will come.

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Squirrel!

Like Dug The Dog from Pixar’s movie, Up!, marketers too often are distracted by the latest shiny thing. In my view, strategy should dictate tactics. But tactics are fun and strategy is hard, marketers say.  And that’s the way it is with social media. More than half of all marketers are currently engaged in some form of social media, according to eMarketer, but do they really have a grasp of how it fits into overall business objectives?

“With so much intense interest and activity, the big question is, Are marketers doing it right?” said Geoff Ramsey, eMarketer CEO and author of “10 Best Practices for Success with Social Media,” one of the Insight Briefs in the series. “Since social media marketing has the potential to affect so many areas of an organization,” he said, “the enormity of this opportunity leads many marketers to chase after every technique, tactic and metric that passes them by.”

Social media is not about marketing, and that is why I believe an organization’s PR group should take the leadership. Good public relations has always been about dialogue, listening to your publics before you respond.

Do you agree? Tell us who you think should be responsible for social media.

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Front Page Coverage - That’s What I Want!

Does everyone in business seem to think all you have to do is call the local daily paper and they come out to do a page one profile of your business? With all the downsizing, it’s hard enough just to get the media to open your emails or take your calls. Getting a front page story just because you want it: priceless.

I was talking with a prospect once who tossed this off as if it was no big deal, “of course we’d like to have the paper come down, meet our principals and do a profile of our business.” Another one wants to become a “rock star-type celebrity” in his industry.

Well, I’d like to win the lottery, but at least I know I have to buy a ticket first in order to be in the running.

Got any thoughts on this subject?

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Top Content

In case you missed some of our posts, here are the top five read of all time:

Twittering Journalists

Top 10 Story Starters For Blocked Bloggers

Newspapers: Dig The Grave 

When Billboards Go Bad

It’s The Relationship, Stupid

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Social Media: Nothing New To See Here

Social Fresh, a conference on this thing we call social media, was held in Charlotte August 24.  The presentations were top-notch and the networking opportunities were excellent, but at the end of the day I can report there is nothing new about social media.

If you are in PR and have been practicing it correctly, you can handle social media. PR is about dialogue. So is social media.

If you are in marketing and have followed best practices, you can handle social media. Marketing is about crafting a relevant message and delivering it to the right person at the right time. So is social media.

The big questions about social media are the ones we have wrestled with in marketing for years: how do we integrate social media into the fabric of the organization, and how do we show hard-nosed business executives that social media does have an impact upon the bottom line.

Is social media new and different, or is it the same-old, same-old? We’ll be talking more about this in the days ahead, and would love to have your thoughts on the topic.

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Talk To Me, Don’t Pitch Me

Hey lazy PR people! Now that I have your attention, don’t send off-target information for inclusion in this blog, OK? Just like Valeria Maltoni at Conversation Agent, I get too many press releases from lazy PR people who can’t take the time to figure out what it is that I write about. To them, I’m just another name on the distribution list. Blast away with the shotgun and you are bound to hit something.

Come to think of it, I don’t really want press releases. Send me a short email with your idea for THINKing. I’ll read it, I promise. And if it is on-target, I’ll do something with it. Same holds true for people wanting to do guest commentary for THINKing.

Any PR people - lazy or otherwise - with a different idea? Tell me.

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Everyman 1, Influentials, 0

Back in the 20th Century, you might remember, PR people were advised to determine who were the influentials in their market and spend the majority of their efforts reaching these elites. The theory was that if you reached these centers of influence - the media or someone who could influence popular culture - you could develop more targeted programs and avoid a mass approach. Approaching influentials was less expensive than mass communications.

The internet changed all that. Information and influence have now been democratized. Like the corporate world, culture is less hierarchical and has fewer layers.We now have a cheap way to reach a mass audience. That’s not to say there is no place for influentials in your marketing program. Although, Duncan Watts disagrees. He thinks it is a waste of money to try to target what Malcolm Gladwell called “tastemakers.” But that is a story for another day.

The media is losing much of its power and its mass appeal thanks to its lockstep liberal media bias and the rise of citizen journalism. I still think PR pros can utilize the media to help reach key audiences, however there are new ways to spread your message. Blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter are the new media PR practitioners need to master.

Guy Kawasaki has some excellent advice for anyone who wants to master these new tools for profit. You’d be well advised to read and put his thoughts into practice.

By Harry Hoover

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Pithy Pitches

Your painstakingly crafted email pitch is completely customized and ready to send to the in box of that carefully targeted reporter. There it goes! Did you hear that? That was your email pitch being deleted.

Here’s why: You didn’t spend more time on the subject line than you did on the email body. Ragan has a feature entitled Email subject lines in eight words or less that provides some good examples of subject lines that worked. One of my favorites was,

“Colorado: Help bring a cow into the world”: This kind of subject line is hard to resist—and Greg Morton, group director of PR for Praco PR in Denver, was counting on just that reaction when he penned this subject line for his client, the Colorado Tourism Office.

In a previous post, THINKing provided Six Tips For Perfect Email Media Pitches. One of the primary tips,

Brevity is the soul of wit. Shakespeare could have been giving media relations tips when he penned this gem several hundred years ago. If you can’t get to the point in your subject line in 10 words or less, you need to work on your message. Keep the subject line short and to the point, and include the time frame if it is important to the pitch.

Burrelle’sLuce has a tip sheet on the topic that you may want to register to receive.

What are you waiting for? Start pitching.

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Building Brands One Touch At A Time

Thanks to Jason Falls, I saw this post today about brand touch points, which provided an excellent case study of how to bring your brand to life. So much of what we do as marketers involves communication with digital media that we forget how powerful the human touch can be in building a brand.

In the old days, that is the 50s and 60s when you could reach all of America with a fairly simple media buy, you could build a brand primarily with advertising. Today, public relations leads - or at least should lead - the brand building charge. Your PR people should audit every contact you have with your publics to make sure those contacts resonate with your brand. Remember, as we discussed recently, that your employees are your primary communication vehicle.

I once worked on a project for an airline in which we looked at every point of contact. Some of these points of contact were out of the brand’s control, although customers didn’t think that they were. For instance, signage and parking at the airport were little things that angered customers that the airline could not control. In fact, out of something like 30 points of contacts customers mentioned, about half were out of the airline’s control. But these were essential to the brand. So, we had to come up with ways to strengthen the ones we could control and mitigate the ones we couldn’t.

This airline had a high percentage of repeat customers. So we offered them an email program that provided them with directional information and parking tips for the various airports this airline flew into. Where we couldn’t control, at least we could inform.

Have you done an audit of your brand’s touch points? Any surprises about what customers thought were points of contact within your control? How have you changed your touch points to better serve customers and build your brand?

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